


in between days

by diogxnes



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Gen, Good Parent Jim "Chief" Hopper, Hurt/Comfort, Nightmares, Panic Attacks, Post-Season/Series 02, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Steve Harrington Needs a Hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-26
Updated: 2020-03-26
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:34:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23321773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/diogxnes/pseuds/diogxnes
Summary: Hopper’s number is on the fridge. “For emergencies,” he’d told Steve, because it was still risky to have a phone at the cabin at all and it would be even riskier the more they used it. But this is an emergency.Hopper picks up on the third ring. “I swear to god—”“It’s here,” Steve gasps out.
Relationships: Steve Harrington & Jim "Chief" Hopper
Comments: 15
Kudos: 290





	in between days

**Author's Note:**

> i swear i'm still working on lovers in a dangerous time!! i'm almost done with the final chapter. in the meantime, here's some steve & hop to pass the quarantine time.

There’s something in the house with him. Steve is sure of it, has been sure of it since the moment he woke suddenly with his heart already pounding—there’s something else here, something that shouldn’t be, and sitting up in bed, dressed only in his boxers and gasping for breath, he knows he isn’t safe.

“Fuck,” he hisses to himself, the word coming out more like a wheeze than anything, “fuck, fuck, _fuck, fuck, fuck…_ ” He scrambles out of bed as quickly and quietly as he can and pulls a t-shirt on with shaking hands. The nail bat is propped up next to his desk. He picks it up, and then, having armed himself as much as he can, he doesn’t know what else to do.

For a long moment, he just stands in the middle of the room, staring at the door and trying desperately to make his panicked breathing a little less loud. He can’t stay in here, he realizes. His bedroom is on the second floor, and it’s a long way down from the window with nothing to break his fall—if it finds him in here, he’ll have nowhere to go. His only chance of survival is to try and get out the front door, and then to his car, and then he can drive to Hopper’s—

No, he can’t go to Hopper’s. He can’t go tearing through the woods to a secret cabin in the middle of the night. That would be risky, and stupid, and it would put Hopper and El in danger because he might be _followed_ which means he’ll just have to drive aimlessly and hope he can outrun it for long enough—

First, though, he has to make it out of the house.

He opens his bedroom door slowly and peers out into the hall. It’s completely dark, and he feels his heart rate pick up further. Whatever’s out there, he won’t be able to see it coming. He steps out lightly, holding the bat out in front of him like a gun. He wishes he had a gun. He wishes he knew how to _use_ a gun. Nancy can use a gun. Nancy Wheeler of all people can wield a rifle better than he can. But Nancy isn’t here to protect him, because Nancy’s with Jonathan now, and Jonathan is also better at fighting than Steve is. Maybe that’s why Nancy chose him—better monster protection. The thought makes a hysterical laugh bubble up in his throat.

And then he clamps his mouth shut and puts a hand over it for good measure, because there’s a fucking _monster_ in his house, he can’t be fucking _laughing_ about it or it’ll hear him, or maybe it’s already heard him, maybe it’s on its way up the stairs right now and Steve just didn’t notice because he was too busy thinking about his fucking ex-girlfriend—

There’s a sound from somewhere, from the kitchen maybe, and Steve starts running. He knows he’s being loud, knows he’s running _toward_ the sound, not away from it, but the only thing that seems important is getting out to his car so that he can get the hell away from this place.

He’s at the front door when he realizes that his car keys are in his bedroom.

A moment later, he realizes that his house is completely dark because the lights aren’t flashing, and if the lights aren’t flashing—

He’s alone.

The relief lasts only a second before it occurs to him that the Demogorgon must have just gone elsewhere. Because it was here, it _was,_ he’s absolutely certain of that, and if it’s not here now then it must have left to go find a different victim, which means that someone else is in danger even if he isn’t, and he might still be too, because it could come back at any moment. That was what happened at Jonathan’s house, after all. It was gone until it wasn’t, and then when it came back it tackled Jonathan and nearly killed him, _would_ have killed him if Steve hadn’t been there at exactly the right moment—

Hopper’s number is on the fridge. “For emergencies,” he’d told Steve, because it was still risky to have a phone at the cabin at all and it would be even riskier the more they used it. But this is an emergency.

Hopper picks up on the third ring. “I swear to god—”

“It’s here,” Steve gasps out.

“Harrington?” Steve nods even though he knows Hopper can’t see him, unable to make another sound around the frantic heartbeat filling his entire chest and throat. “What’s going on? Are you safe?”

“I don’t know.” The words come out in something like a whimper, which he vaguely registers should be embarrassing, but he can’t feel anything but blind panic. “It was here, it was _here,_ and now it’s not, and I don’t—I don’t—”

“Slow down, kid,” Hopper instructs him. “Just slow down and tell me what happened.”

All the annoyance in his voice has gone and now he just sounds calm and commanding. Steve closes his eyes and sags against the wall a little, trying to take a few deep breaths before he continues. “I woke up and it was here,” he whispers. “It—”

“What was there?”

“The Dem—the Demo—”

“Okay,” says Hopper. “Did you see it?”

Steve shakes his head frantically. Hopper doesn’t _understand._ “No, I just—I _felt_ it, I could _tell,_ and then I tried to get out of the house but I think it’s gone now, I can’t find it, but it was _here,_ Hopper, and now it’s not, so it must be out there somewhere, and—”

“Steve,” Hopper interrupts him firmly. “Breathe, kid. I’m gonna come over, okay?”

“No,” says Steve. “No, you can’t leave El alone, it might be coming—”

“El is sleeping over at the Byers’. Look, I’ll call Joyce before I leave to make sure they’re all safe, alright? Just, stay where you are and try to stay calm. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“Okay,” Steve whispers, and then the line goes dead. Still clutching the phone, he lets himself slide down the wall until he’s sitting on the floor. He’s dizzy, suddenly. He’s so dizzy he can hardly stand to keep his eyes open.

He can’t really tell how much time passes while he sits there. He wouldn’t be surprised by anything between five minutes and two hours. All he’s aware of is how hard he’s shaking and how conspicuously loud his breathing is and how pathetically ill-equipped to fight he’ll be if the Demogorgon comes back before Hopper gets there. He won’t be able to do it. He won’t be able to fight it at all. He’ll just be _sitting_ there, a literal sitting duck. He realizes suddenly that he’s still holding tightly on to the nail bat. It won’t do him much good in his trembling, useless hands.

A sudden pounding sends a sickening jolt of adrenaline through him and he jumps up so quickly that, for a moment, his vision goes black. In his haze of panic, it takes him a few seconds to realize that the pounding is actually knocking—the front door. Someone is at the front door. Hopper, unless it isn’t Hopper. Would the Demogorgon knock? He’s pretty sure it wouldn’t, but he’s been proven wrong about a lot of things he thought he knew these past couple years.

It takes his shaking hands a few tries to pull the door open, and when he sees Hopper, silhouetted against the street light, he’s so relieved that he lets out an involuntary noise somewhere between a whimper and a groan. And then one of Hopper’s hands is on his shoulder, maneuvering him to the side so that Hopper can step in and shut the door behind him, and Hopper is saying, a little gruffly, “Okay, kid, you’re okay,” and only then does Steve realize that there are tears streaming down his face.

He lets Hopper guide him into the living room and sit him down on the sofa, not letting go of his shoulder the whole time. For a few seconds he just sits beside Steve in silence and then he says quietly, “What happened, Steve?”

Steve doesn’t know what happened. He only knows that he woke up already panicking and dead certain that there was something in the house with him, and that he’s still not quite convinced there _isn’t_ something in the house with him, or at least something roaming Hawkins nearby. And if the _something_ is in Hawkins but not in Steve’s house, then it might be at Dustin’s house, or Lucas’s, or Max’s, or the Byers’ or the Wheelers’ and _none of the people he loves are safe—_

“Steve,” says Hopper again. Steve realizes that he’s drawn back a bit, probably to give him space, but the sudden absence of Hopper’s solid, tangible presence so close to him just makes the panic more intense. “Whoa, whoa. Just breathe with me, okay? In…and out. In…and out.”

Steve tries to take a deep breath in time with Hopper’s loud, exaggerated ones and finds that his lungs won’t expand enough to allow it. “I can’t—”

“Yes, you can.” Hopper’s hand has returned, this time rubbing slow circles on his back. “You can. There’s nothing here, Steve, I promise. There’s nothing here.”

With a great effort, Steve manages to drag in another breath and blow it out slowly.

“Good, good,” says Hopper. “That’s it. Another one.”

Steve takes another one, and then another, and another. Slowly, the dizziness starts to recede. As the tightness crawls back from his chest, it settles somewhere deep in his bones. He feels tense, exhausted, weighed down.

“Nothing happened,” he says after a few minutes of breathing deeply in time with Hopper. His voice is humiliatingly weak and shaky and it’s been too long for him to really be answering Hopper’s question, but he keeps speaking anyway. “I just, I woke up and—and I had this _feeling,_ like—” His voice breaks and he clamps his mouth shut. Now that he’s calmed down a bit, he’s coherent enough to be embarrassed—and it _is_ embarrassing, deeply, that he’s made the chief come over in the middle of the night to watch Steve hyperventilating and crying over nothing. He won’t let any more tears fall. He _won’t._

Hopper’s hand has not left his back, but it’s still now, a steady weight resting between his shoulder blades. “Like you were still there in the middle of it all. Like it never went away.” Steve looks up at him, surprised. “Kid, I get it. Fuck, I understand that more than anything.”

Steve can’t picture Hopper waking up so afraid and panicking like this. He definitely can’t picture him weeping with fear. But Hopper is looking at him so seriously that Steve knows he means it.

“Every time the lights start flickering,” says Hopper. “Every time I cough. I swear to god, I can still _smell_ those tunnels sometimes. And it’s not just all this supernatural shit. El got sick once, and I—” He cuts himself off abruptly, but Steve catches a glimpse of the grief in his eyes before he turns away, staring ahead at the fireplace, and knows that Hopper is alluding to that little girl he’s only heard about in whispers from the kids. “I get it,” he says again.

“Does it ever stop?” Steve whispers.

Hopper sighs. “I don’t know, kid,” he says. He sounds exhausted. “Maybe not completely. But it will get better.”

“How?”

It’s a stupid, childish question, even to Steve’s own ears, and it doesn’t help that his voice is still choked with the effort not to cry. But it’s out of his mouth before Steve can stop it.

“With time,” says Hopper. “And, you know, talking to people. Like this. That can help too.” He pauses. “I’m glad you called me.”

His voice is so soft, so much gentler than Steve’s ever heard it, and for some reason it’s that more than the lingering panic that makes fresh tears well up in Steve’s eyes. He ducks his head, trying to preserve what little pride he has left, but it’s not enough to conceal the hitching of his breath or the way his shoulders begin to shake again.

“You’re okay, kid,” Hopper says quietly. His hand resumes its slow circles on his back. “It’s okay.”

His words only make Steve cry harder. “ _Fuck,”_ he chokes out through his tears. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I—”

“Steve. You don’t have to apologize to me, okay? Just let it out.”

It’s a long time before Steve stops crying. When his tears are finally done, he feels utterly drained. He buries his head in his hands, trying to breathe evenly.

Hopper sits with him in silence for a few minutes longer. Then he asks quietly, “Where are your parents, kid?”

Steve shrugs.

“They been gone long?”

“Just a couple days.” It’s been longer than that, but not enough longer that Steve really feels like he’s lying.

Hopper sighs, and Steve gets the impression that he doesn’t believe him. “When do they get back?”

“Dunno.” He sniffs loudly, embarrassingly. “End of the week, maybe?”

“Alright. You can crash on my couch till then.”

It takes Steve a few seconds to process what Hopper has said. When he does, he looks up, startled. “No, I—you don’t need to—”

“Don’t argue with me.” Hopper’s usual gruffness is back, and for some reason Steve finds it immensely comforting. “It’s for my sake, okay? I’m not gonna be able to relax if I know you’re here all alone.”

Steve knows that Hopper’s only saying that to let Steve preserve some of his pride. Still, he doesn’t protest again. He’s relieved, if he’s honest. He’s certain he won’t be able to fall back asleep in his own house tonight, and probably not for a few more days either. So he just mumbles, “Thanks, Chief.”

“Don’t mention it. You ready to go, or do you need a minute?”

Steve takes a deep breath and tries to will away the last of his dizziness. “I’m ready.”

Locking the front door behind them, crossing the lawn in the quiet, still night, climbing into the passenger seat of Hopper’s truck, Steve feels an inexplicable sense of calm settle over him. Hopper is silent and the radio is turned off, but the silence isn’t uncomfortable. Steve rests his head against the window, and though he doesn’t mean to, he falls asleep before they’ve left the neighborhood.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! you can find me on tumblr @ diogxnes
> 
> title from the Cure song of the same name


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